Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and genderminorities that are not heterosexual or not cisgender. Originally meaning "strange" or "peculiar", queer came to be deployed pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late-19th century. Beginning in the late-1980s, queer scholars and activists began to reclaim the word to establish community and assert a politicized identity distinct from the gay political identity. Queer identitites may be adopted by those who reject traditional gender identities and seek a broader, less conformist, and deliberately ambiguous alternative to the label LGBT.

Queer has become the preferred term to describe certain radical academic disciplines and is gaining use as a descriptor of non-normative[note 1] (i.e. anti-heteronormativity and anti-homonormativity) identities and politics.[1] Academic disciplines such as queer theory and queer studies share a general opposition to binarism, normativity, and a perceived lack of intersectionality within the mainstream LGBT movement. Queer arts, queer cultural groups, and queer political groups are examples of expressions of queer identities.

Critics of queer identities include gay activists who associate the term with its pejorative colloquial usage or who wish to dissociate themselves from queer radicalism.

Etymology

Entering the English language in the 16th century, queer originally meant "strange", "odd", "peculiar", or "eccentric". It might refer to something suspicious or "not quite right", or to a person with mild derangement or who exhibits socially inappropriate behaviour.[1][2] A Northern English expression, "There's nowt so queer as folk," meaning, "There is nothing as strange as people," employs this meaning.[3]

Queer as a pejorative

By the time "The Adventure of the Second Stain" was published, the term was starting to gain a connotation of sexual deviance, referring to feminine men or men who would engage in same-sex relationships. An early recorded usage of the word in this sense was in an 1894 letter by John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry.[5] Usage of queer as a derogatory term for effeminate men become prominent in the 20th century.[1] In the early-20th century, individuals with non-normative sexual or gender identities, including English poet and author Radcliffe Hall, preferred the identity of invert. In the mid-20th century, the invert identity lost ground and shifted toward the homophile identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the homophile identity was displaced by a more radicalized gay identity, which at the time included trans and gender-nonconforming people.

During the endonymic shifts from invert to homophile to gay, queer was pejoratively applied to men who were believed to engage in receptive or passive anal or oralsex with other men[6] as well as those who exhibited non-normative gender expressions.[7]

Reclamation

Beginning in the late-1980s, the label queer began to be reclaimed from its pejorative use as a neutral or positive self-identifier by LGBT people.[1] An early example of this usage by the LGBT community was by an organisation called Queer Nation, which was formed in March 1990 and circulated an anonymous flier at the New York Gay Pride Parade in June 1990 titled "Queers Read This".[8] The flier included a passage explaining their adoption of the label queer:

Ah, do we really have to use that word? It's trouble. Every gay person has his or her own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious [...] And for others "queer" conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suffering [...] Well, yes, "gay" is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we've chosen to call ourselves queer. Using "queer" is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world.

The term may be capitalized when referring to an identity or community, rather than as an objective fact describing a person's desires, in a construction similar to the capitalized use of Deaf.[11]

The "hip and iconic abbreviation 'Q'" has developed from common usage of queer, particularly in the United States.[12]

Inclusivity and scope

Because of the context in which it was reclaimed, queer has sociopolitical connotations and is often preferred by those who are activists—namely, by those who strongly reject traditional gender identities; reject distinct sexual identities such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight; or see themselves as oppressed by the homonormativity of the politics of the broader "gay" or "LGBT" community. In this usage, queer retains its historical connotation of "outside the bounds of normal society" and can be construed as "breaking the rules for sex and gender". It can be preferred because of its ambiguity, which allows queer-identifying people to avoid the sometimes rigid boundaries that are associated with labels such as "gay", "lesbian", or even "transgender".

While initially used only to refer to radical homosexuals, opinions on the range of what queer includes can vary. For some people, the non-specificity of the term is liberating. Queerness thus becomes a path of political resistance against heteronormativity as well as homonormativity while simultaneously refusing to engage in traditional essentialist identity politics.[13]

Queer bodies

Intersex activists have sometimes talked of intersex bodies as "queer bodies".[14] Activists and scholars such as Morgan Holmes and Katrina Karkazis have documented a heteronormativity in medical rationales for the surgical normalization of infants and children born with atypical sex development.[15][16] In "What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex?" Iain Morland contrasts queer "hedonic activism" with an experience of insensate post-surgical intersex bodies to claim that "queerness is characterized by the sensory interrelation of pleasure and shame".[17]

However, concerns have been raised among intersex activists that LGBT or queer groups including them could give the wrong impression that all or most intersex people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/ or transgender. Another concern is that the addition is only cosmetic, and that among groups that do this, LGBT goals are always prioritized over intersex ones.[18]

To make it worse, the word "intersex" began to attract individuals who are not necessarily intersex, but feel that they might be, because they are queer or trans. Many of these people felt that to be intersex meant a social and biological justification for being who they are, as in it's okay that you're queer or trans because they were literally "born that way." This obviously clashes with the majority of people born with intersex conditions, who despite their intersex bodies feel that they are perfectly ordinary heterosexual, non-trans men and women.[19]

Queer academia

In academia, the term queer and the related verb queering broadly indicate the study of literature, discourse, academic fields, and other social and cultural areas from a non-heteronormative perspective. It often means studying a subject against the grain from the perspective of gender studies.

Other social movements exist as offshoots of queer culture or combinations of queer identity with other views. Adherents of queer nationalism support the notion that the LGBT community forms a distinct people due to their unique culture and customs. Queercore (originally homocore) is a cultural and social movement that began in the mid-1980s as an offshoot of punk expressed in a do-it-yourself style through zines, music, writing, art and film.

The term queer migration is used to describe the movement of LGBTQ people around the world often to escape discrimination or ill treatment due to their orientation or gender expression. Organizations such as the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees attempt to assist individuals in such relocations.

Controversial nature of the term

The use of the term queer is not uncontroversial. Many people and organizations, both LGBT and non-LGBT, refuse to use the word.[23] There are several reasons for this.

Some LGBT people disapprove of using queer as a catch-all because they consider it offensive, derisive or self-deprecating, given its continuous use as a form of hate speech in English.[24]

Other LGBT people resent the use of the word queer in this sense because they associate it with political radicalism. They also disagree with how the deliberate use of the epithet queer by political radicals has played a role in dividing the LGBT community by political opinion, class, gender, age, and so on. The controversy about the word also marks a social and political rift in the LGBT community between those (including civil-rights activists) who perceive themselves as "normal" and who wish to be seen as ordinary members of society and those who see themselves as separate, confrontational and not part of the ordinary social order.[25]

Some LGBT people avoid queer because they perceive it as faddish slang or academic jargon.[26]

^Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein (2008). That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (illustrated, revised ed.). Counterpoint Press. p. 1. ISBN9781593761950. Retrieved 11 March 2015. Willful participation in U.S. imperialism is crucial to the larger goal of assimilation, as the holy trinity of marriage, military service and adoption has become the central preoccupation of a gay movement centered more on obtaining straight privilege than challenging power

Notes

^Note that "non-normative" does not mean "not normal", but rather refers to the privileging of "normal" genders and sexualities over the "non-normative". "Normative" brings attention to the fact that "normal" does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is created and reified through structural oppression. See also heteronormativity for more context.